He was slow, slower than Skjorl had been, even when he’d had the outsider on his back.
‘You want him to catch us?’ she asked as the trees either side of the Yamuna grew thicker and taller.
‘I’d walk quicker with hands,’ was all he said.
For once, as the sun came up, Kataros was awake. The two of them sat, carefully apart, either side of a tiny fire. The trees were huge, their trunks as wide as a man with his arms outstretched. They reached up towards the sun and the clouds, sheer pillars of wood a hundred feet or more from the ground to the first branches, and this was only the fringe of the forest. High overhead the leaves were so thick that they all but blotted out the light. Daytime in the Raksheh was a perpetual twilight.
‘I haven’t seen fire for months.’ Kataros watched Siff’s eyes follow the smoke as it rose. The warmth was delicious.
‘Smoke calls dragons,’ he said.
‘In the deep caves it’s choking death.’
On the ground around them almost nothing grew. The earth was covered with a thick layer of dead leaves, moisture from the rain seeping through the canopy above. Here and there, in the few places where the sun broke through, bushes and saplings grew together, fighting for the light. In the darker damper places mushrooms grew instead, some of them as tall as a man. Some of them, she knew, were poisonous. Others were edible. The Raksheh was a place for alchemists. Alchemists and outsiders.
‘There’s going to be people here, most likely,’ said Siff after a bit. ‘Maybe they could help us.’
Company. She yearned for that, but what would a tribe of outsiders do if they found themselves an alchemist? Nothing good. ‘If there are people here, we will hide from them.’
‘Don’t think you can. Maybe if you move fast and far enough. Get further up the river. I don’t know how many months ago it was I came down from the caves, but there weren’t any people living by the river until I got close to the edge of the forest. It was all wild up there. Keep going for two or three days and hope for the best.’ He smiled happily. ‘If you ask me, I don’t think there’s much you can do about it. Just be thankful you left doggy behind. They’d kill him.’
‘They’ll kill me too, won’t they?’
His smile grew wider. Here it came. ‘Well now. Maybe they might. Or maybe, since they’re more my sort of people, I could talk them out of it. If I had hands.’ She tried to reach through the blood-bond and found nothing, just as it had been since the night in the old alchemists’ cellar. The thing Siff had inside him, even when it was asleep, kept her out.
Siff sniffed. ‘Not being all tied up like this might make me more amenable to help you.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You’ll have to do better than that.’
‘We could tie your hands instead. Then they’d think you were mine.’
She laughed bitterly. ‘So after they hit you over the head with a rock, they’d feel free to help themselves to your property? No, Siff, you stay as you are.’ There was always another way. There was the alchemist’s way, the way of thought and foresight and knowledge. She got up and wandered away from the fire to where the nearest little forest of mushrooms grew. These ones barely came past her ankles. From their mustard-yellow tops they were goldcaps, which were fine enough to eat if you didn’t mind a few strange dreams. They’d make an oil to soothe the skin too. Her feet had blisters from all the walking; they could do with some soothing.
She cut some goldcaps, speared them on a few twigs and took them back to the fire. They were best fried in fish oil but these days you took what you could get. Goldcaps fried in anything at all would be a luxury back under the Purple Spur. After they’d started to crisp around the edges, she took them out from the flames and sprinkled a little white powder over them and handed one to Siff.
‘What did you put on them?’ Siff sniffed his mushroom suspiciously.
‘Salt.’
He took a bite. She almost had to smile at the way his face lit up. ‘This is good!’
‘It’ll give you dreams.’ She wondered, too late now, whether that was wise. Did the thing Siff had inside him dream?
She ate her goldcap and then went to cut some more. ‘We’ll move on a way. Until we find some shelter.’
‘My feet hurt.’
‘So do mine.’
‘Hand to get up?’
‘Do it yourself.’
Not much further upriver they found a massive branch fallen from one of the trees. There was a hollow under it filled up with dead leaves. Good enough.
‘That’ll do for some shelter.’ Siff yawned. ‘Good forest blanket there and wood to keep the rain off. Ancestors! I’m exhausted.’
Kataros nodded. This was the bit where she fell asleep and Siff tried his best to get out of his ropes, took her knife and slit her throat. Or maybe he didn’t slit her throat, maybe he simply ran away. She let him see her thinking. He yawned again.
‘There’s nowhere for you to go,’ she said, and pointed. ‘You have that bit. I’ll be somewhere else. You’ll pardon me if I watch you while you go to sleep.’
‘If you must.’ Siff chuckled to himself. She could almost read his thoughts. You think I can’t fool you, alchemist? They both knew he could hide things from her, blood-bound or not.
She watched him anyway. When he started to snore, she crept closer. ‘Salt,’ she whispered. ‘And a little more. Enjoy the dreams.’ She sighed and stretched and snuggled down under her end of the fallen log. It was damp, the leaves prickled her skin, but she was so tired she barely noticed. Sleep, for once, without the Adamantine Man to look over her, to watch her. She shivered, thinking about that. Yes, she was glad he was gone. She closed her eyes and tried not to think about all the things that might go wrong, all the things that lived in the Raksheh that were poisonous, the spiders, the centipedes, the scorpions, the little six-legged biting lizards and their larger scavenger cousins who’d have a go at anything that wasn’t quick enough to run away. The packs of man-eating snappers that were supposed to roam the place. Yes, tried not to think about any of that, and then, to her surprise, it was suddenly late in the day and she woke up with a start.
Something was prodding her. Something sharp.
She blinked.
Three outsiders were standing over her log. They had spears.
51
Sixteen days before the Black Mausoleum
Jasaan saw the second snapper but none of them saw the third. It took Hellas from the side and bit clean through his arm. Hellas screamed and spun around. Blood sprayed across the lizard, and then the snapper lashed with a claw and ripped most of Hellas’ face off. An instant later its jaws came down again. It picked Hellas up by his head and shook him, threw him against one of the trees and hissed. Hellas landed in a heap of limp limbs. He didn’t move.
Jasaan caught glimpses, but mostly he was running. The second snapper burst forward and pounced, flying twenty feet through the air to land on a rider’s back and bear him to the ground. Before anyone could do anything, the snapper was ripping at him with his hind claws.
Jasaan stopped. He ran back to the dead snapper and started levering his axe out of its head. The fallen rider was screaming for help. He had armour, dragon-scale over metal, too tough even for snapper claws, but that wouldn’t stop the beast from crushing the man inside. It would find a way in, sooner or later.
He looked about for Nezak and the other rider but they were gone. Had the sense to flee like he ought to. Thing was, you never knew with snappers how many were out there. In the Blackwind Dales and up on the moors packs as large as twenty had savaged entire villages.
